Shadow The Hedgehog
There are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin
Tags: Shadow The Hedgehog Categories: Game Cube Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jake McNeill on Dec 19th, 2005
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Shadow The Hedgehog (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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Sega. Hedgehog. Guns. What the… who the…. How the…. I…. it just…. The mere notion is so stupendously stupid I can’t even form a coherent sentence in my attempts to fathom it. Sega, do yourselves a favor and fire whoever came up with that idea. Then, hire him back, just so you can fire him again. Oh, but that’s not even the beginning of this game’s woes.
So… let’s go back to the beginning. Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis… man, everyobody loves Sonic. Well, they used to, then, back in his 2D days when every schoolkid was brainwashed into saying “blast processing” like that meant something. Dammit, this game is making me bitter. Focus, McNeill, focus! So, Sonic was great. The only videogame mascot who could ever stand toe to toe with Mario and really seem like a worthy rival. He was cool, he was fast, he was awesome, and then… he was 3D.
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Yeah, when Sonic Adventure came out and the series tried to make the same move into the third dimension that Mario did, the shift didn’t go quite as smoothly. The Sonic gameplay worked more or less, but the level designs seemed to slow things down too often (Sonic was built for speed!), the extra characters were starting to clutter up the gameplay, and the “adventure” elements totally went against the no-nonsense action the series made its focus from the start. Ultimately, the game was pretty good, but flawed.
Over the years, Sega tried adding and taking away elements to make the 3D thing work, in each case making some things better, some things worse, and the overall game less enjoyable in the longrun. Sonic Adventure 2 took out a lot of the “adventure”, which was good, but then forced you to play boring characters and their annoying levels through 2/3 of the game. The Sonic stuff was still great, but now there was less of it. *Grumble*. Then, Sonic Heroes just meshed the three character types into one instant-swapping team. Problem was, the game was buggy as hell, and the controls were terrible. But when it worked, it was still fun to play. And now, Shadow the Hedgehog…
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Okay, look, let’s ignore for now the fact that you don’t play as Sonic, but one of the lesser characters the series has soaked up like algae over the years. Let’s even forget that he uses guns and shoots down actual people, which not only goes against the series’ theme and world, but seems a totally pathetic attempt to ape the “gangsta’” craze (or at the very least, the whole “Matrix” thing). Heck, I’ll even throw them a bone: as dumb as they are, the guns don’t really detract from the gameplay. No, it’s the gameplay that detracts from the gameplay.
Like Sonic, Shadow zips around at a pretty fast speed. Unlike Sonic, Shadow wears skates. And he controls like it, too. Which is to say, his controls are very loose and imprecise, he can’t turn worth crap, and it takes a lot of babying to get him not to run into enemies or off cliffs. Which means slowing down. Do you see where this is going?
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The level designs work against this too, often making obstacles hard to distinguish from the surrounding environment, or popping up at the last moment, just to make sure that if you even try to attempt the speed thing, you get swatted down like a bug. And since most enemies aren’t particularly slow themselves, often you’ll find yourself unable to adequately dodge attacks you saw coming and should have been able to avoid easily, if it weren’t for Shadow’s ineptitude. Oh, and to make things more “fun”, most enemies take multiple hits, so even if you get one of them, while you’re trying to come around for another pass, they’ll pull themselves up and hit you again. And while Shadow does have Sonic’s jumping spindash that automatically flings him at the nearest enemy, it also has a tendency to occasionally fling him off cliffs as well, as it did in Sonic Heroes, so really, it’s lose-lose.
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And to deliver the coup de grace, Shadow the Hedgehog has one of the worst cameras I’ve seen in a platformer. The thing has a tendency to hang right behind him and right next to the ground, which translates into many, many deaths by running into things you could have otherwise seen and easily avoided (even with the game’s control problems). The best part is, you can move the camera freely using the C-stick, but once you start moving again, the camera automatically moves back in to the close-up of Shadow’s butt. I’m seriously wondering if this game’s camera was maybe designed by someone with an unhealthy hedgehog fetish. Someone who cares more about getting a good look at hedgehog butt than they do about making a videogame playable. Oh, and the camera is even worse when you jump in a car. Yeah, that’s right, a car. I’m not even going to bother going into it at this point.
If there’s one thing they got right in the game it’s the graphics. Sure, the textures are bland and the character models are nothing special, but the environments are pretty big, the framerate is solid, and a lot of the effects like the occasional blur or the chaos of a sandstorm look quite nice.
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Of course, a nice-looking near-unplayable game is still a near-unplayable game. I could go into the whole multiple-path good-evil thing like my colleague Mark does in his review of the Xbox version, but I honestly don’t think it matters. Hey, you can work towards different goals and be good or evil… but the game is terrible no matter how you play it. Sonic fans dying for a fix should look to the newly-released Sonic Rush for the Nintendo DS, because all they’ll find here is pain and despair.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ The graphics are occasionally impressive, and the framerate is smooth and steady + The guns actually work okay with the gameplay |
4.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- ...But seriously, guns? - And wow do the controls ever suck - And the level design is terrible - And the camera is horrendous |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Someday, Sega might actually do Sonic right in 3D, but at the moment, this is the worst attempt yet. This game is bad in so many ways it’s almost like Sega forgot why people loved the Sonic games to begin with. | |
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Tags: Shadow The Hedgehog
Posted by Jake McNeill on Dec 19th, 2005 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
